As part of the division's rebranding and product initiative, UCLA Store's Publishing and Outreach Director, Guy Adams, selected Symtext’s Liquid Textbook platform as one of the main platforms to provide UCLA’s faculty and students with market leading technology and services for custom digital learning materials.

With Symtext, UCLA Store satisfies several objectives: the requirement to provide faculty and students with a store managed, on-campus learning materials solution that showcases UCLA Course Reader Solutions’ services; market leading assembly and distribution tools for custom digital learning materials; support for mobile devices including iPad and Android; a clear and sustainable business model; and a reduction in the store's reliance on paper. UCLA Course Reader Solutions also gains enormous flexibility over copyright and permissions: using Symtext’s permissions management engine the group clears its own copyrights, realizing very competitive prices that save students money.

Importantly, the Liquid Textbook platform and workflow processes allow UCLA Course Reader Solutions to operate at scale: with active plans to expand, the group already produces over 50,000 coursepacks a year, all of which will be offered to students in digital form this year. Taken as a whole, Symtext’s platform and services differentiates UCLA Store from generic online booksellers, and enhances the Store’s position as the go-to learning materials resource for UCLA students and faculty.

Branding: Present the school or campus store logos and colors to faculty and students

Online and offline apps: Symtext’s offline apps download all available materials, while synchronizing annotations and comments between offline and online modes.

Search: Lightning fast document searching and universal searching. A universal search instantly returns hits from all the documents contained in a Liquid Textbook

Highly advanced OCR and document conversion technology: Symtext can take virtually any file, including very low quality digital scans, and produce a searchable, highlightable, "active" document.

LMS integration tools and services: Single Sign On via the LMS saves students from creating separate IDs and passwords.

Change and modify the contents of a Liquid Textbook at any time with the inclusion of links, videos, articles, self-authored materials and etc.

Sophisticated permissions management tools: Ability to implement detailed permissions, from pricing to printing, for every item in a Liquid Textbook.

Custom Metrics: Schools concerned about losing usage and learning patterns data to large online booksellers now have a solution.

About UCLA StoreThe UCLA Store, an enterprise of the Associated Students UCLA, has been selling Bruin merchandise since UCLA established its Westwood campus in 1919. In the spirit of our motto, “It All Comes Back To You,” all proceeds from UCLA Store are reinvested in a variety of ways including top-notch products and services for the UCLA community, state-of-the-art campus facilities and funding for student activities.

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About Symtext

Symtext is a collaborative social learning platform used by schools, educators and publishers to provide ‘educator curated learning materials’ to students. Known as Liquid Textbooks, these curated materials are made available to students within cloud-based, HTML5, mobile, social, device neutral readers. Materials within a Liquid Textbook may be fee-based or open, text or multi-media, educator-authored or obtained from a major publishing house. All are fully rights-managed for delivery online, offline, to specific devices as well as print-on-demand platforms.